Hosting - wildly different response times across the globe

[badger_nz]

Hi all,

I recently opened an account with a USA-based hosting company.

I'm new to the world of hosting providers, and I have a question
regarding performance that I'm hoping somebody here can answer in plain
language.

I have uploaded a static .html page onto my domain. The page links in
two stylesheets and a few images - total page size is 65kb. I opened an
account with a website monitoring company, www.websitepulse.com. They
provide response time stats from 17 countries around the world.

My static html page is fed-up to a user in Los Angles in 0.5 seconds.
That is great, just what I'm after. BUT, other sites in the States
(Miami, Ct, Illinois) take an average of five seconds for the same
page. Worse, European sites (London, Dusseldorf, Munich) take an
average of 15 seconds, and Singapore/Australia/New Zealand take up to
25 seconds.

I raised this issue with my hosting company's support desk - they told
me that this is due to geographic distance between their servers and
the client machines accessing them. Unfortuantely, so slow response
times will mean that users will probably surf away from my new website
before they ever get a chance to see its content!

So, my question is; how/where can I host a website so that I get
acceptable response times for international traffic? Surely the
differnece in response times between LA (0.5 seconds) and London (15
seconds) can't be 'normal'?

Any comments appreciated.

James.

 

[MarkusJNZ]

Hi, one thing to remember is that you get what you pay for in hosting
as well. Cheap hosting means that you will be sharing your server with
a whole bunch of other peoples websites who will take up that servers
resources/ bandwidth which can lead to slow response times as well.

Just a thought
Regards
Markus